During his chummy chat with Fox & Friends’ Steve Doocy this morning, Donald Trump repeated his obvious lie that he has heard from “so many parents” begging him for the repatriation of remains of their sons who were killed in the Korean War.
Among other love lavished on his new BFF, North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, Trump gushed over the fact that Kim is supposedly returning the remains of American soldiers killed during the Korean War. It was an obvious attempt to cast his affinity for Kim as selfless patriotism.
TRUMP: We had good chemistry. … He’s giving us back our great heroes who died, as you know. We’re getting the remains back and I’ve had so many people, so many parents, so many fathers and daughters and sons asking me, “Please, please.” This is during the campaign and after.
FACT CHECK: This is similar to the baloney Trump said on Special Report Wednesday night. As Think Progress explained, it’s true that there are families trying to recover the remains of fallen veterans from North Korea. But we can be pretty certain that Trump has not heard from “so many” of their parents during and after the campaign:
American involvement in the Korean War ended in 1953. If we most generously assume that the parent of a future solider was 18 when their child was born, and that their child was 18 when he was killed on the last day of the war, that means a parent would have been 99 in 2016.
While almost all parents of fallen Korean War veterans would’ve been much older than that in 2016, it’s not inconceivable that a 99-year-old parent of a fallen Korean War veteran might have approached Trump during the campaign. But note that Trump claimed multiple parents approached him... That seems exceedingly unlikely, at best.
Special Report anchor Bret Baier, as you can see below, silently failed to challenge the obvious falsehood. But Doocy validated it by saying, “Right.”
Watch two Fox interviewers let Trump get away with a whopper below, from the June 13, 2018 Special Report and June 15, 2018 Fox & Friends. Trump’s June 15 remarks about parents of Korea War veterans begin at about 13:52.